Maryna Viazovska

The signatories span nearly 50 years of winners.

Terence Tao, Peter Scholze, Maryna Viazovska, Maxim Kontsevich, James Maynard, Jun Huh, right through to this year's class.

Getting 25 of these people to agree on lunch is hard.

Getting them to co-sign a criticism of one industry practice has no real precedent.

Um, so okay, so there are a couple of things.

So first, what is this LP of D? So Viazovska's work actually builds on some earlier work.

Um, it turns out that there's a way to attack sphere packing via what's called a linear programming bound.

So LP just stands for linear programming.

... experienced mathematicians, like, it's a half a paragraph to prove it, but it's a little bit tricky.

Um, and the point is, um, so it turns out, so this is a relaxation problem.

There's no guarantee that taking the optimal F will give you a good bound on delta D. Um, but so what Viazovska, um, did, and this was sort of the key, I mean, a large part of the reason she won a Fields Medal in, um, in twenty twenty was that, or in twenty twenty-two, was that, um, she constructed a function in eight and twenty-four dimensions such that this upper bound matches exactly these two very special lattices.

Mm-hmm.